Making .EXE from encrypted .zipx creates a buggy file that doesn't work

gui.lherme

I’m reporting a bug in the SFX module that creates an .exe file that doesn’t extract and shows unexpected behavior.

Steps to reproduce

Compress files to optimized zipx format with ultra compression and AES 256-bit encryption;

Put a password. Here I put: password ;

Select the option Make .EXE file from Actions menu;

Create the SFX with Default “UnZip To” folder similiar to the screenshot and the checkbox Hide file list CHECKED;

Try to extract the files;

It’s a weird and unpractical thing that it will ask for a password for each file instead of using the same pass for all of them. It should be and exception to ask for an other password when some file has a different one.
So, type in the password. My pw is password as I stated before;

Strangely, it will keep asking the password for the same file over and over. You will have to skip or cancel. Skipping it will eventually lead to the same error below, so let’s cancel it;

When you cancel, it will give a Incorrect Password error;

Remember that we CHECKED Hide file list when we created the SFX file? Now, as well as the dialog being completely bugged, 2 of the 3 files now are apearing in this list that never should have appeared.

I will leave here links to the original .zipx file and the .exe I created.
Remember that the password is just password.

Pictures.zipx
Pictures.exe

PowerArchiver version used:

Also, there’s one more bug I found out. If you add a file to that same archive that has some russian characters in the name, the SFX file list will show weird characters instead of the correct file name. Look:

I used a file named рисунок-арт-красивые-картинки-удалённое-1710969.jpeg ;

Created a new SFX file, this time with Hide file list UNCHECKED on purpose. This is how the russian file name was presented:

Based on what I saw, it seems for me that the SFX creator module is in need of some work, looks kinda abandoned and outdated. The question mark button on the title bar ( ? ) also didn’t do anything for me, the cursor changed for a question mark but it didn’t work for anything.

spwolf

@gui-lherme Hello, indeed, make sfx uses old code… Please use SFX Wizard to create SFX Archives.

It will use 7zip format for better compression.

spwolf

@gui-lherme And thanks for nice big report. For make sfx in zip, we use tiny assambler code to minimize the size of sfx. Adding all of the zipx format support would make it as big as 7zip sfx. So it is much better to use 7zip sfx, since it will also lower the size of archive.

For near future, we are looking into supporting PA SFX, which gives more options, is more secure.

gui.lherme

My suggestion to completely rework the SFX module. Take as an example the WinRAR’s SFX generator module; it’s pretty decent and very customizable. I think that PowerArchiver SFX is currently very poor and deserves a lot of work.

spwolf

@gui-lherme said in Making .EXE from encrypted .zipx creates a buggy file that doesn't work:

My suggestion to completely rework the SFX module. Take as an example the WinRAR’s SFX generator module; it’s pretty decent and very customizable. I think that PowerArchiver SFX is currently very poor and deserves a lot of work.

Indeed, as mentioned, we will create .PA SFX module for next release. It will use PA or 7z format, not ZIP, since there are no benefits of using zip sfx over pa/7z.

Thanks.

gui.lherme

@spwolf Ok, sounds interesting. Make sure to rework the SFX interface and make it very customizable, so we can distribute professional looking installers.

Thanks